I submitted maurices.com to Hubspot’s website grader. They received a grade of 90. After reviewing the results, my recommendations for the maurices.com website included the following:
1. Clarify or simplify the content to reflect a more appropriate readability level. Their current rating indicates a readability level of advanced/doctoral degree. They would better serve their customers by bringing the reading level down to at least a high school level.
2. Establish necessary relationships with other reputable websites in order to increase the number of inbound links to it. Maurices.com had 9,339 inbound links compared to almost 32,000 inbound links for the competitor I chose. Jeanne Hopkins posted a blog entry on Friday, April 30, 2010, at HubSpot's Inbound Internet Marketing Blog called “Oh No! My Website Grader Score Went Down!” It states in the post that a link from CNN.com or NYTimes.com will increase a website's authority. The more authority your site has, the greater the likelihood that Google and Bing will place it higher in their organic results.
3. Metadata tags tell the search engines what a web page is about. Maurices.com should shorten the page title for better results. The maximum recommended length for page titles is 70 characters and the current page title is over double that at 143 characters.
Just for fun, I submitted Target.com to the website grader. Their website received a grade of 99. Target’s readability level was reported as secondary/high school. Target has more than 320,000 inbound links and their page title was within the recommended number of characters.
Target seems to do most things very well, so it is not surprising that Target’s online privacy policy is very detailed. Consumer privacy concerns are self-regulated by individual businesses (Roberts, p. 311), and Target clearly provides a lot of information. The website tells their consumers what information they collect, how they share it, and how to limit the sharing of information. According to a study that dealt with direct marketing practices, 33.3% of people rarely read website privacy policies and 4.5% of people always read them (Roberts, p. 308). Personally, I fall into the “rarely read” category.
We are all aware of the privacy issues that can occur when we go online, but for most of us it must be worth the risk. It’s hard (impossible, really) to imagine life today without the internet.
1. Clarify or simplify the content to reflect a more appropriate readability level. Their current rating indicates a readability level of advanced/doctoral degree. They would better serve their customers by bringing the reading level down to at least a high school level.
2. Establish necessary relationships with other reputable websites in order to increase the number of inbound links to it. Maurices.com had 9,339 inbound links compared to almost 32,000 inbound links for the competitor I chose. Jeanne Hopkins posted a blog entry on Friday, April 30, 2010, at HubSpot's Inbound Internet Marketing Blog called “Oh No! My Website Grader Score Went Down!” It states in the post that a link from CNN.com or NYTimes.com will increase a website's authority. The more authority your site has, the greater the likelihood that Google and Bing will place it higher in their organic results.
3. Metadata tags tell the search engines what a web page is about. Maurices.com should shorten the page title for better results. The maximum recommended length for page titles is 70 characters and the current page title is over double that at 143 characters.
Just for fun, I submitted Target.com to the website grader. Their website received a grade of 99. Target’s readability level was reported as secondary/high school. Target has more than 320,000 inbound links and their page title was within the recommended number of characters.
Target seems to do most things very well, so it is not surprising that Target’s online privacy policy is very detailed. Consumer privacy concerns are self-regulated by individual businesses (Roberts, p. 311), and Target clearly provides a lot of information. The website tells their consumers what information they collect, how they share it, and how to limit the sharing of information. According to a study that dealt with direct marketing practices, 33.3% of people rarely read website privacy policies and 4.5% of people always read them (Roberts, p. 308). Personally, I fall into the “rarely read” category.
We are all aware of the privacy issues that can occur when we go online, but for most of us it must be worth the risk. It’s hard (impossible, really) to imagine life today without the internet.
After reviewing your blog regarding Target and Maurices and their respective rankings, I can only imagine that it is mostly in part to the required capital to ensure corrective maintenance, systems integration, consulting, design, programming, and specialization of software. Target has deep pockets which enables them to spend continously in the efforts to make their website "the mecca" of retail giants. I have enjoyed reading your blog by the way, thank you.
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